Wednesday, September 24, 2014

Feminists have been arguing that it's "victim-blaming" to suggest steps that women can take to reduce the risk of being sexual assaulted. But what if that same logic were applied to all crime prevention tips?

It might go something like this:

Stop blaming the victims of theft

We should be teaching people not to steal, not telling people to lock their doors and windows.

Parking in well-lit areas, not hiding keys near the front door, avoiding websites that ask for your Social Security number -- these are all just ways that we blame the victims of theft. And it needs to stop.

Stop blaming the victims of violent crimes

I don't want to live in a world where I can't jog down deserted streets at night. I shouldn't have to change my normal behavior because someone wants to attack me or steal my iPod.

Telling me to be aware of my surroundings perpetuates "burglary culture" where it is somehow my fault that I got mugged....

Here's the problem with this: If your car is stolen from a poorly lit parking spot, or you transmit your Social Security number to an email scammer, and the perpetrator is caught, the authorities won't let the perp go simply because they think you were "asking for it." The authorities won't assume that you wanted the perp to take your car or drain your bank account because you didn't take precautions. If the feds catch a hacker breaking into Web accounts, they don't reduce the charges against that hacker by concluding that access to any account with the password "abc123" was likely to be consensual. When the perps enter the criminal justice system, no one threatens to bring up the victims' complete history of incaution or gullibility ("You've used this password before, haven't you? On how many websites?") in order to get the charges dropped. And no Ross Douthat argues that the car was stolen or the money electronically transferred because our freewheeling car or Internet culture has too few moral restraints, to which the perp was having a perfectly understandable response.

Oh, and if you lock your car in a poorly lit spot and it's stolen anyway, no one says that you really wanted it stolen because you didn't also have a car alarm, because locking the car was your way of saying "No" to car theft, but not having an alarm was how you told the thief that "No" really means "Yes." Blurred lines, right?